Archive: June, 2014

Well, the second Responsive Day Out was a most excellent day out indeed. I figured it would be, what with that excellent line-up of speakers. Still, I was blown away by the quality of the talks—everyone over-delivered.

Once again, lots of people remarked on how much they liked the format of three back-to-back short talks followed by a group discussion. And needless to say, Ethan’s closing keynote was the perfect rousing finish to the day.

Despite it being a rough’n’ready affair, everything went pretty smoothly. The only annoyance was the way the room got a bit hot and stuffy towards the end of the day’s proceedings.

(It’s ironic. For the past few years we’ve had a conference in the Corn Exchange at the end of June—Ampersand—and the weather always turned out to be pretty drab, which we moaned about. This year we finally got some weather and it made the conference a bit uncomfortable. You can’t win.)

All in all though, it was a terrific day of inspiration and thought-provocation. If you came along, thank you. If you didn’t make it, you can catch up with post-conference reports from these people:

• Kirsty,
• Sally,
• Ida,
• David Watson,
• Adam Onishi,
• Orde Saunders,
• Hidde de Vries.

Marc took some great pictures and Drew did his usual terrific work recording all the audio:

Stephen, Sally, Ida, chatting with Stephen, Sally, and Ida, Rachel, Dan, Yaili, chatting with Rachel, Dan, and Yaili, Oliver, Kirsty, Stephanie, chatting with Oliver, Kirsty, and Stephanie, and the one and only Ethan.

Here’s the RSS feed to put into your podcatching software of choice.

In the pub afterwards, quite a few people asked me if there’d be a third Responsive Day Out. My initial feeling is “no” …but then again, I thought that after the first one too. So who knows? Maybe there’s room for one more (but then it really would be the last one). We’ll see.

But in the meantime, there’s one event that is most certainly happening that you definitely don’t want to miss: dConstruct 2014.

As I said at the closing of Responsive Day Out 2, dConstruct is a very different kind of event. There won’t be any delving into CSS specs. But it’s the perfect event for any web designer or web developer who wants to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. And it’s ruddy good fun.

So if you liked Responsive Day Out, you’re going to love dConstruct. Get your ticket now.

The sequel I’ve been eagerly awaiting—Responsive Day Out 2—is almost here! It kicks off tomorrow morning at 9am. I probably won’t be able to sleep much tonight, but that’s okay: I’ll need to be at the Corn Exchange in the Brighton Dome bright and early to help get everything set up.

I always love the atmosphere on the day before an event in Brighton. I like seeing the updates from friends far and wide as they arrive into town. Everything is coalescing nicely: speakers, attendees, and all-round lovely people are begin to show up and gather together.

If you’re coming to the conference, you’re in for a treat. There’s going to be a lot of brain food provided. There will not, however, be any food food provided. But don’t fret. There’s a nice long hour-and-a-half lunch break, and plenty of options for food nearby.

I recommended heading up the street to the weekly Street Diner at the top of Church Road.

If you’re going to Responsive Day Out tomorrow, here’s the lunch menu on stalls up the road at @StreetDiner pic.twitter.com/QbVHNggaXW

— Anna Debenham (@anna_debenham) June 26, 2014

Once the conference is done, we’ll head to the pub. No particular pub, just …the pub. There are plenty within cat-swinging distance of the venue.

If you’re still in Brighton on Saturday, there are some sporty events planned.

On Saturday morning, after #responsiveconf, we’re going to do the Preston Park parkrun. Join us? It’s only 5k http://t.co/YrWMWScl09

— Drew McLellan (@drewm) June 25, 2014

Are you coming to Responsive Day Out? Don’t forget to stay for Saturday for the special Web Talk Dog Walk: http://t.co/lFgdEdxD9R :)

— Laura Kalbag (@laurakalbag) June 16, 2014

And if you’re already in town, there’s a Business of Web Design event tonight at 68 Middle Street.

See you tomorrow!

I met Sandijs of Froont fame when I was in Austin for Artifact back in May. He mentioned how he’d like to put on an event in his home city of Riga, and I said I’d be up for that. So last weekend I popped over to Latvia to speak at an event he organised at a newly-opened co-working space in the heart of Riga.

That was on Friday, so Jessica I had the rest of the weekend to be tourists. Sandijs rented a car and took us out into the woods. There, in the middle of a forest, was an observatory: the Baldone Schmidt telescope.

The day we visited was the Summer soltice and we were inside the observatory getting a tour of the telescope at the precise moment that the astronomical summer began.

It’s a beautiful piece of machinery. It has been cataloging and analysing carbon stars since the ’60s.

Nowadays, the images captured by the telescope go straight into a computer, but they used to be stored on glass plates. Those glass plates are now getting digitised too. There’s one person doing all the digitising. It takes about forty minutes to digitise one glass plate. There are approximately 22,000 glass plates in the archive.

It’s going to be a long process. But once all that data is available in a machine-readable format, there will inevitably be some interesting discoveries to made from mining that treasure trove.

The telescope has already been used to discover a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. It’s about 1.5 kilometers wide. Its name is Baldone.

Responsive Day Out 2 is just ten days away. If you’ve got a ticket, I’ll see you there. If you haven’t got a ticket, sorry; they’re all sold out. But despair not—some people who have tickets can’t make it and they’re looking to transfer theirs:

Matt Hill, Ali Springall, Marta Armada, and Matt Smith.

Either way, if you can make it to Brighton on Friday, June 27th, you’re in for a treat.

The location is the Corn Exchange at the Brighton Dome, a short walk from the train station. We’ll be using the main Dome entrance on Church Street. Just follow the geeks.

Bring along your ticket (either on paper or on a screen) or some form of ID. If you have a ticket and you can’t make it after all, feel free to transfer it to someone else: there’s a link in the email you got when you registered that will allow you to update the attendee details.

As with last year, the event will be a fast-paced affair, with each section chunked into groups of three back-to-back fast talks followed by a joint discussion with all three speakers.

I’ve grouped the talks into sections that are roughly thematically-related. The day will kick off with a section grouped around planning and process. Then there’ll be a more technology-focused section. After lunch, there’ll be a more big-picture, strategic section. At least one of the talks in each section will be based around a case study.

The one exception to the format is the final section of the day. That’s all Ethan, all the time. It will be Ethantastic.

The order might end up changing, but here’s what I’ve got planned:

9:00 – 10:00	Registration
10:00 – 10:20	Stephen
10:20 – 10:40	Sally
10:40 – 11:00	Ida
11:00 – 11:15	Chat with Stephen, Sally, and Ida.
11:15 – 11:45	Break
11:45 – 12:05	Rachel
12:05 – 12:25	Dan
12:25 – 12:45	Yaili
12:45 – 13:00	Chat with Rachel, Dan, and Yaili.
13:00 – 14:30	Lunch
14:30 – 14:50	Oliver
14:50 – 15:10	Kirsty
15:10 – 15:30	Stephanie
15:30 – 15:45	Chat with Oliver, Kirsty, and Stephanie.
15:45 – 16:15	Break
16:15 – 17:15	Ethan!
17:15 – 17:30	Chat with Ethan.
17:30 – ??:??	Pub

Now, just to make sure that your expectations are in check, remember that this is a very rough’n’ready spit’n’sawdust kind of event. You won’t be getting a conference programme. You won’t even be getting a lanyard. Lunch is not provided (but Street Diner will be on that day—yay!). There is no pre-party. There is no after-party. And if you want a cup of tea or a coffee, it’ll cost ya.

Basically, every expense has been spared for this. There’s only aspect where we haven’t cut any corners, and that’s with the speakers. I can guarantee you a day of excellent talks.

See you next Friday!

Here in the UK, there’s a “newspaper”—and I use the term advisedly—called The Sun. In longstanding tradition, page 3 of The Sun always features a photograph of a topless woman.

To anyone outside the UK, this is absolutely bizarre. Frankly, it’s pretty bizarre to most people in the UK as well. Hence the No More Page 3 campaign which seeks to put pressure on the editor of The Sun to ditch their vestigal ’70s sexism and get with the 21st Century.

Note that the campaign is not attempting to make the publication of topless models in a daily newspaper illegal. Note that the campaign is not calling for top-down censorship from press regulators. Instead the campaign asks only that the people responsible reassess their thinking and recognise the effects of having topless women displayed in what is supposedly a family newspaper.

Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism project has gathered together just some examples of the destructive effects of The Sun’s page 3. And sure, in this age of instant access to porn via the internet, an image of a pair of breasts might seem harmless and innocuous, but it’s the setting for that image that wreaks the damage:

Being in a national newspaper lends these images public presence and, more harmfully for young people, the perception of mainstream cultural approval. Our society, through Page 3, tells both girls and boys ‘that’s what women are’.

Simply put, having this kind of objectification in a freely-available national newspaper normalises it. When it’s socially acceptable to have a publication like The Sun in a workplace, then it’s socially acceptable for that same workplace to have the accompanying air of sexism.

That same kind of normalisation happens in online communities. When bad behaviour is tolerated, bad behaviour is normalised.

There are obvious examples of online communities where bad behaviour is tolerated, or even encouraged: 4Chan, Something Awful. But as long as I can remember, there have also been online communites that normalise abhorrent attitudes, and yet still get a free pass (usually because the site in question would deliver bucketloads of traffic …as though that were the only metric that mattered).

It used to be Slashdot. Then it was Digg. Now it’s Reddit and Hacker News.

Thx to Reddit & HN, “hacker" has moved away from its clever nerd (Wozniak) & rogue agent (Mitnick) connotations towards “misogynist asshole”

— Jason Kottke (@jkottke) March 25, 2013

Some days Hacker News and Reddit are nothing more than the Westboro Baptist Church of the Internet.

— Faruk Ateş (@KuraFire) March 21, 2013

I’m terrified every time I blog about anything even slightly controversial that someone will post it on Reddit or HN. That says something.

— CultureOfFear & BEES (@juliepagano) March 19, 2013

In each case, the defence of the bad behaviour was always explained by the sheer size of the community. “Hey, that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing can be done about it.” To put it another way …it’s normal.

But normality isn’t an external phenomenon that exists in isolation. Normality is created. If something is perceived as normal—whether that’s topless women in a national newspaper or threatening remarks in an online forum—that perception is fueled by what we collectively accept to be “normal”.

Last year, Relly wrote about her experience at a conference:

Then there was the one comment I saw in a live irc style backchannel at an event, just after I came off stage. I wish I’d had the forethought to screenshot it or something but I was so shocked, I dropped my laptop on the table and immediately went and called home, to check on my kids.

Why?

Because the comment said (paraphrasing) “This talk was so pointless. After she mentioned her kids at the beginning I started thinking of ways to hunt them down and punish her for wasting my time here.”

That’s a horrible thing for anyone to say. But I can understand how someone would think nothing of making a remark like that …if they began their day by reading Reddit or Hacker News. If you make a remark like that there, nobody bats an eyelid. It’s normal.

So what do we do about that? Do we simply accept it? Do we shrug our shoulders and say “Oh, well”? Do we treat it like some kind of unchangeable immovable force of nature; that once you have a large online community, bad behaviour should be accepted as the default mode of discourse?

No.

It’s hard work. I get that. Heck, I run an online community myself and I know just how hard it is to maintain civility (and I’ve done a pretty terrible job of it in the past). But it’s not impossible. Metafilter is a testament to that.

The other defence of sites like Reddit and Hacker News is that it’s unfair to judge the whole entity based purely on their worst episodes. I don’t buy that. The economic well-being of a country shouldn’t be based on the wealth of its richest citizens—or even the wealth of its average citizens—but its poorest.

@adactio if Reddit does something “good" it’s one community, it does something bad it’s “not all reddit”. It’s such a dull argument.

— David Singleton (@dsingleton) June 10, 2014

That was precisely how Rebecca Watson was shouted down when she tried to address Reddit’s problems when she was on a panel at South by Southwest last year:

Does the good, no matter if it’s a fundraiser for a kid with cancer or a Secret Santa gift exchange, negate the bigotry?

Like I said, running an online community is hard—Derek’s book was waaaay ahead of its time—but it’s not impossible. If we treat awful behaviour as some kind of unstoppable force that can’t be dealt with, then what’s the point in trying to have any kind of community at all?

Just as with the No More Page 3 campaign, I’m not advocating legal action or legislative control. Instead, I just want some awareness that what we think of as normal is what we collectively decide is normal.

I try not to be a judgemental person. But if I see someone in public with a copy of The Sun, I’m going to judge them. And no, it’s not a class thing: I just don’t consider misogyny to be socially acceptable. And if you participate in Reddit or Hacker News …well, I’m afraid I’m going to judge you too. I don’t consider it socially acceptable.

Of course my judgemental opinion of someone doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to anybody. But if enough of us made our feelings clear, then maybe slowly but surely, there might be a shift in feeling. There might just be a small movement of the needle that calibrates what we think of normal in our online communities.

A week ago, I tweeted:

After a long weekend of coding, I’ve got a brand new section on my website.

http://adactio.com/notes/

But that tweet did not originate on Twitter. That tweet is a copy. The original is here.

To be honest, I’ve never been that pushed about having my own bite-sized updates hosted on my own site and syndicated out to Twitter. I’m much more concerned about my photos. Still, I thought it was pretty cool the way that Chloe, Aaron, Amber, and Barnaby have a “notes” section on their sites hosting the canonical URLs of their updates, so I thought I’d give it a shot too.

Michael Bester has written about his online homesteading process. You can also read—or listen to—Chloe’s process.

Creating a new section on my own site is pretty straightforward. My home-rolled CMS is really creaky and ropey but it gets the job done. The notes section is just another kind of post, same as journal, links, and articles. The tricky bit (for me) was figuring out how to post a copy to Twitter.

It was pretty clear which API method I needed to use. The hard part was all the OAuth stuff. I’ve never meddled with that kind of voodoo before.

I signed into dev.twitter.com and created an application called adactio.com. I’m given an API key and an API secret. This application will only never need to post as me, so I was able to take advantage of single-user OAuth to generate my access token and access token secret:

By using a single access token, you don’t need to implement the entire OAuth token acquisition dance.

Now I had the four pieces I needed to send with a status update:

1. my consumer key,
2. my consumer secret,
3. my access token, and
4. my access token secret.

I found a small PHP library that uses Andy’s OAuth code. Looking at the source code, I was able to figure out what I needed to send to Twitter. The OAuth class is doing all the hard work—my PHP code is fairly basic.

Imagine my surprise when it actually worked.

I fiddled around with my site’s crude templating system so that if I’m logged into my little CMS, I’m presented with a simple update form on the front page of adactio.com.

When I type a note into that form and hit “post”, here’s what happens:

1. I store the note in my own database.
2. I send a copy to Twitter as a status update.
3. Twitter returns a JSON object with info about the tweet I just created.
4. I take the ID of that tweet and store it in my database along with the original note.

Having the ID of the copy on Twitter allows me to provide some Twitter-specific actions from my own site: reply, retweet, fave, etc.

Okay, so now I’m posting to Twitter from my own site. Nifty! But what about receiving notifications from Twitter? If someone replies to, or likes, or favourites the copy of my note on Twitter, it would be nice to get notified about it on adactio.com.

This would be a really complex problem to attempt to solve for myself, but fortunately I don’t have to. Brid.gy is a magical tool written by Ryan Barrett that you can authorise to watch your Twitter profile. It will send a webmention back to the canonical URL on your own site whenever anyone replies to, or retweets or favourites a post.

Because I’ve already got webmentions on my site, Brid.gy worked straight out of the gate—a lovely demonstration of some small pieces, loosely joined.

Like I said, I wasn’t all that pushed about hosting my own short updates but now that I’m doing it, I’m really, really enjoying it. It feels good.

It feels good to be using my own website for “microblogging”. I know that’s a distasteful phrase but it’s a fairly accurate way of describing how I tend to use Twitter. My earliest tweets definitely feel like short blog posts.

Conversely, looking back on how I was blogging very early on, a lot of those short posts feel like tweets. So it feels good to bring those notes back to adactio.com.